Robin Cook is the former foreign minister of Great
Britain and was a member of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet
before resigning over the decision to go to war with Iraq.

London—Chutzpah is the word applied
to people who radiate belief in themselves without any visible reason
to justify it. In the chutzpah stakes United States Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld is way off the top of the scale.

Before the war he told us that Saddam had "large stockpiles of chemical
and biological weapons and an active program to develop nuclear weapons."
After the war he explains away the failure to find any of these stockpiles
or nuclear installations on the possibility that Saddam’s regime
"decided they would destroy them prior to a conflict." You
have to admire his effrontery.

But not his logic. The least plausible explanation is that Saddam destroyed
his means of defense on the eve of an invasion. The more plausible explanation
is that he did not have any large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

We need to rescue the meaning of words from becoming a further casualty
of the Iraqi war. A weapon of mass destruction in normal speech is a device
capable of being delivered over a long distance and exterminating a strategic
target such as a capital city. Saddam had neither a long-range missile
system nor a warhead capable of mass destruction.

Laboratory stocks of biological toxins or chemical shells for use on the
battlefield do not add up to weapons of mass destruction. But we have
not yet found even any of these.

When the cabinet of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government discussed
the dossier on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, I argued that
I found the document curiously "derivative." It set out what
we knew about Saddam’s chemical and biological arsenal at the time
of the previous Gulf war. It rehearsed our inability to discover what
had happened to those weapons. It then leaped to the conclusion that Saddam
must still possess all those weapons. There was no hard intelligence of
a current weapons program that would represent a new and compelling threat
to our interests.

Nor did the dossier at any stage admit the basic scientific fact that
biological and chemical agents have a finite shelf life. Odd, since it
is a principle understood by every chemist. Go to your medicine chest
and check out the existence of an expiration date on nearly everything
you possess.

Nerve agents of good quality have a shelf life of about five years and
anthrax in liquid solution of about three years. Saddam’s stocks
were not of good quality. The Pentagon itself concluded that Iraqi chemical
munitions were of such poor standard that they were produced on a "make-and-use"
regimen under which they were usable for only a few weeks. Even if Saddam
had destroyed none of his arsenal from 1991 it would long ago have become
useless.

It is inconceivable that no one in the Pentagon told Rumsfeld these home
truths, or at the very least tried to tell him. So why did he build a
case for war on a false claim of Saddam’s capability?

Enter stage right (far right) his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, a man of such
ferociously reactionary opinion that he has at least the advantage to
his department of making Rumsfeld appear reasonable. He has now disclosed:
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on weapons of mass destruction
because it was the one issue everyone could agree on."

Wolfowitz is famously a regime-change champion. He was one of the flock
of Republican hawks who wanted a war to take over Iraq long before 9/11.
Decoded, what his remarks mean is that the Pentagon went along with allegations
of weapons of mass destruction as the price of getting US Secretary of
State Colin Powell and the British government on board for war. But the
Pentagon probably did not believe in the case then and certainly cannot
prove it now.

Wolfowitz also let the cat out of the bag over the "huge prize"
for the Pentagon from the invasion of Iraq. It has furnished an alternative
to Saudi Arabia as a base for US influence in the region.

As Rumsfeld might express it, we have been suckered. Britain was conned
into a war to disarm a phantom threat in which not even our major ally
really believed. The truth is that the US chose to attack Iraq not because
it posed a threat but because the US knew Iraq was weak and expected its
military to collapse.

It is a truth that leaves the British government in an uncomfortable position.
Blair has been pleading for everyone to show patience and to wait for
weapons to be found. There is an historic problem with this plea. The
war only took place because the coalition powers lost patience with chief
UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and refused his plea for a few more months
to complete his disarmament tasks.

There is also a growing problem of transatlantic politics with the British
prime minister’s plea for more time. The US administration wanted
the war to achieve regime change, and now it has that and does not see
why it needs to keep up the pretense that the war was fought to deliver
disarmament. The more time passes, the greater the gulf will widen between
the obliging candor on the US side that there never was a weapons threat
and the desperate obfuscation on the British side that we might still
?nd one.

There is always a bigger problem in denying reality than in admitting
the truth. The time has come for the British government to concede that
we did not go to war because Saddam was a threat to our national interests.
We went to war for reasons of US foreign policy and Republican domestic
politics.

One advantage of such clarity is that it would help prevent us from being
suckered a second time. Which brings us to Rumsfeld’s latest saber-rattling
against Iran. It is consistent with the one-dimensional character of the
Rumsfeld world view that he talks of Iran as if it were a single unified
entity. In fact, Iran is deeply divided by a power struggle.

On the one side are President Khatami and the majority of the parliament
who are reformers, reflecting the political reality that most Iranians
consistently vote to join the modern world. On the other hand are the
conservative forces of the old Islamic revolutionaries led by Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, who still retains control over the security apparatus.

When Labor took office I initiated a policy of constructive engagement
with the reformist government, which has been skillfully continued by
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw. It bore fruit for us in its renunciation
of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, and it has been helpful in providing credibility
as people who could build a positive relationship with the outside world.

The blanket hostility to Iran of the Bush administration has undermined
the reformers and provided a welcome shot in the arm to the ayatollahs.

British policy on Iran makes sense in securing the advance
of the reformers, which is in the interests of ourselves and of the Iranian
people. This time we must make clear to the White House that we are not
going to subordinate Britain’s interests to a US policy of confrontation.
Iran must not become the next Iraq.